The Yale English department’s director of graduate studies and I did not like each other. That simple sentence contains conceptual errors, but also some truth. Surely I did not like him. He was tall, fiftyish, balding though handsome, and highly accomplished, with what I took to be an authoritarian aura. I was 26 and generally disliked anyone who had power over me.
Sitting in his office, as I planned my classes for my first term in graduate school, it seemed necessary to dramatize my resistance. I did this by slinging one leg over the arm of the Yale-insignia office chair and making my black-leather jacket creak with what I hoped to be menacing exasperation. He wanted me to take courses in Old English and the Augustan age, subjects in which I had no interest.
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